There Is Too Much Suffering For Apathy

Category Archives: Food Security

Clerics in Syria have authorized Muslims living in the besieged Damascus suburbs to eat meat that would typically be forbidden by the religion.

In a video, a group of religious leaders issued a fatwa, or a ruling, allowing people stranded in areas that are controlled by rebels to eat cats, dogs, and donkeys to prevent starvation, BBC reports. The ruling came during the Muslim celebration of Eid Al-Adha, which ends Tuesday evening.

The clerics called it a “cry for help to the whole world” from the war-torn country, where tens of thousands have been killed and displaced during the civil war.

‘“If you really want to get wages to grow broadly for everybody it means confronting power in the workplace,” said Mishel. “Confronting the fact that we have an economy geared toward creating huge corporate profits and rising stock prices, but not rising wages, and an economy constructed to give some people power and other people less power.’

Mishel also takes issue with the common assertion by President Obama and others that education is a big part of the solution to the wage problem.

‘Whatever President Obama wants to do in schools or getting more people to go to college is not going to change the fact that wages for college graduates have stagnated for ten years,” said Mishel. “More than 25 percent of college graduates are in managerial or business occupations, and they haven’t had a wage increase in ten years. How can anyone think the answer to the wage problem is going to college?’”

“Lori Silverbush, co-director of A Place at the Table , says she always knew people were hungry in the US, but had no idea the numbers were so massive. The film shows hunger increasing under US Presidents, along with clips of them all claiming to tackle the issue. Under Reagan, 20 m Americans were hungry; George HW Bush, 30 m; Bill Clinton, 33 m; George W. Bush, 49 million; President Barack Obama, almost 50 million.

Over the course of interviewing people for two years, Silverbush was shocked to learn that there is hunger in every single county in the US. Before making the film, like many Americans, she believed that writing a bigger check to her favorite charitable organisations was the answer. The other misconception is that we just do not have enough healthy food to feed everyone. That is not true. The real problem is poverty.”

“And with the wealth given to us as Americans, we could have eradicated poverty. We could have created a country that was much different than what we have created. And what’s happening now is that we are being rapidly reconfigured into a kind of neo-feudal society, an oligarchic society where increasingly the bottom two-thirds of Americans are hanging on by their fingertips. You have a shrinking, diminishing middle class and an elite that is just making obscene amounts of money at our expense.” — Chris Hedges

“Among them is Congressman Stephen Fincher, Republican of Tennessee, who justifies SNAP cuts by quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10: ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.’

Even if this quote were not taken out of context — whoever wrote 2 Thessalonians was chastising not the poor but those who’d stopped working in anticipation of the second coming — Fincher ignores the fact that Congress is a secular body that supposedly doesn’t base policy on an ancient religious text that contradicts itself more often than not. Not that one needs to break a sweat countering his ‘argument,’ but 45 percent of food stamp recipients are children, and in 2010, the U.S.D.A. reported that as many as 41 percent are working poor.”

The call for increased collaboration and knowledge exchange in this video is spot on, but the “speeding up” of science to accelerate towards the “future” is too reminiscent of some of the ideologies that helped turn our food system into the mostly unsustainable one it is today.

A beautiful video nonetheless, and an important message regarding partnerships for all those working to support the adaptation of our agricultural systems to climate change.